by Stephen Cave
Borchardt took his secrets with him to his grave. All we know for sure is that Nefertiti’s striking beauty seduced him as completely as it once seduced the young pharaoh Akhenaten. Now she resides on Museum Island in Berlin, where more than half a million visitors per year come to pay tribute. Her name is once again spoken; her image can be seen all across Egypt, just as it could during the reign of the Aten. With her serene and confident smile she says simply: I am returned; I am immortal.
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MAGIC BARRIERS
CIVILIZATION AND THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
THE king of Qin was right to be paranoid: they really were out to get him. His predecessor, who may or may not have been his real father, had lasted only three years on the throne, and the king before that a mere twelve months. His court was built on a legacy of conspiracies, plots and coups. Even his own mother had conspired against him, planning to put her younger sons on the throne. The poor king of Qin could trust no one. But then, he did have a particular knack for making enemies.
This was China in the period known as the Warring States Era, a little over a thousand years after Nefertiti’s fall. It was a blood-soaked time, as competing warlords allied, intrigued and fought for survival. In one action alone—the infamous Battle of Changping—the armies of the king of Qin’s great-grandfather had killed some four hundred thousand men from the neighboring state of Zhao. Our hero was eagerly following this family tradition: his reputation was one of arrogance and cruelty, a barbarian in borrowed finery.
He, however, considered himself simply misunderstood. For in truth, the king of Qin was a man of vision—and his vision was of a unified China, its many peoples living in harmony with each other and with heaven. And this was why his black-clad armies had been steadily encroaching on his neighbors’ territory, pushing eastward from his northwesterly mountain stronghold. His soldiers—who were promoted according to the number of severed heads they gathered—were ruthlessly effective. Soon Qin had swallowed two of the other warring states whole and was turning its attention to the small easterly state of Yan.
To the king’s satisfaction, in 227 BCE Yan sent two emissaries offering submission to the overlordship of Qin. As signs of their goodwill, they brought with them gifts: a detailed map of Yan’s most fertile regions … and a severed head.
The head was that of a senior Qin general who had fallen out of favor with the king and fled to Yan. Most pleased at news of the traitor’s decapitation, the king, who had already killed the general’s entire extended family, prepared to receive his two visitors in grand style. What the king did not know was that the general had willingly given his head—assisting Yan’s emissaries by cutting his own throat—in the hope that it would bring about the king of Qin’s downfall.
The envoys were granted an audience. One climbed the steps to the throne and presented the gifts. The king put the casket with the head to one side and slowly unrolled the map. Just as he reached the end, he saw a glint of metal—but too late. Concealed in the map was a poisoned dagger. The envoy grabbed the weapon with one hand and the sleeve of the king’s robes with the other, and stabbed.
But the king was too fast and had already reared backward, the sleeve of his robes tearing off. He reached for the mighty ceremonial sword that hung at his side, but it was too long to shift from its scabbard, and the assassin was coming at him again. The king fled behind a pillar while his courtiers, all ironically unarmed to prevent their making an assassination attempt, scattered in terror. The guards who stood outside the throne room were allowed in only on the king’s express order—and he was too busy fighting for his life.
As the assassin made another lunge, the king’s old physician blocked the weapon with his medicine bag, giving his master time to swing the scabbard behind him and free the blade. Suddenly the assassin was confronted by an angry king with a very large sword. He threw the dagger at him but missed. The king hacked him down; it took eight blows until he was dead.
The next day, the king sent the armies of Qin to attack Yan. Within a year they had taken its capital, and within five years, they had wiped it from the map. One year after that, his armies had conquered the known world—“all under heaven.” And the king declared himself the first emperor of China.
IT is little wonder that the First Emperor, as he is usually known today, was acutely aware of his own mortality. Many people would have liked to have thrust a dagger between his ribs, and a good few tried. In another legendary assassination attempt, a blind lute player lured the emperor into his proximity, then attacked him with his specially lead-weighted lute. Being blind, the lute player missed and was summarily executed. In another attempt, a hired strongman dropped a 220-pound metal cone from a mountainside onto the emperor’s carriage as it was passing below, destroying it utterly. The emperor, however, was traveling in another carriage in anticipation of just such an ambush. Lest he be tempted to forget his mortal frailty for a moment, the world conspired to remind him.
The first part of the Mortality Paradox tells us that we must live in the consciousness of our own frailty; we are all aware that everything born must die. But for most of us the trappings of culture exist to keep this fact from our minds. Except when death suddenly claims a friend or relative, we are happy to be distracted from our inevitable end. Those who live in the shadow of the assassin, however—the pharaohs, dictators and kings—are continually reminded of the precariousness of their lot. It is a nice irony that this consciousness of vulnerability clings to those in positions of greatest power—as Shakespeare’s Henry IV put it, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
It is therefore in these rulers that we see the full effects of this awareness of inexorable extinction. The First Emperor prohibited—on pain of capital punishment—all mention of death in his presence. Instead, his courtiers were to compose odes on the theme of immortality to be sung wherever he went. On once hearing that graffiti suggesting he would soon die had been found in a distant part of the empire, the emperor sent officials to find the culprit; when they failed, he had all the people living in the district put to death. He was not a man to take intimations of mortality lightly.
But rulers do not just have an exaggerated awareness of the Mortality Paradox; they also have the means to do something about it. By unifying China and declaring himself emperor, the king of Qin had become the most powerful man in the world. If anyone could summon the means to defy death, it was him.
BUILDING WALLS AND BURNING BOOKS
STAYING Alive is the first and most straightforward of the immortality narratives. It is a dream that can be found in the earliest recorded cultures and still thrives today. Indeed many believe that we are now on the verge of the scientific breakthroughs that will finally make this dream a reality. We will examine these claims in the next chapter, when we assess our prospects of following this path to the summit of the Mount of Immortals by banishing disease, aging and death for good. First, we will see how the promise that we can stay alive indefinitely is at the very foundation of civilization.
The psychologists behind Terror Management Theory, discussed in chapter 1, argued that if we confronted the inevitability of death without any protective narrative, we would become “twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety.” The First Emperor certainly appears to have been perfused with anxiety, but he was otherwise successfully able to direct his energies with enormous productivity—because of his belief in an immortality narrative. He believed that it was possible to become invulnerable to death and so stay alive forever. In his attempt to do so, he created China.
Staying alive indefinitely is a continuation of staying alive here and now; it is our day-to-day struggle for survival extended without end. It therefore begins with the basics, the things that all humans need to keep going: food and drink, shelter and defenses. As societies develop, they refine the provision of these essentials, through collaborative efforts, specialization of labor and passing on of skills. At its core, a civilization is a c
ollection of life-extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, medicine to combat injury and disease.
But whereas most people are satisfied with applying these technologies to themselves, their families or their villages, the First Emperor had a much grander vision. He ruled an empire, and his intention was to make it everlasting, with himself forever at its head. To achieve this, he began to separate his dominions from all that was unpredictable and dangerous—all that could bring death. And he went about this literally, in the form of a wall that would stretch for over six hundred miles along his northern border. People of many cultures had long been in the habit of building barricades around houses, villages and even cities—but never before an entire empire. This was the beginning of the Great Wall, built on the blood and sweat of conscripted labor and in whose construction hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have died.
Within these bounds he instituted unprecedented reforms to improve the economy: weights, measures and currency were unified; the written language was consolidated; government and administration were rationalized. From the many warring states, a single nation was created—one that is still widely known as China after the First Emperor’s home kingdom of Qin (pronounced “chin”).
Then infamously, in 213 BCE he declared that all books from schools of thought that opposed his new system were to be burned. Chronicles of past times were destroyed; history was to begin afresh. Only documents thought to assist in prolonging life were spared—those on agriculture, divination and medicine. The rest were banned and their possession deemed a capital offense.
The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges recognized both the Great Wall and the book burning in the context of the emperor’s quest to live forever: “The data suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers intended to halt the advance of death,” he wrote. The First Emperor was attempting to establish a new order that could perpetuate life—his life—indefinitely. This is what the distinction between civilization and barbarism represents: in Borges’s words, the magic barrier between life-sustaining order on one side and chaos, disease and disintegration on the other.
But as he grew into middle age, it became clear to the king-cum-emperor that high walls, productive fields and even new history books would not suffice to keep off aging and disease. So he surrounded himself with the very best doctors, sorcerers, alchemists and sages. Their mission was not only to cure the emperor of common ailments but to hold back the decline that comes with age—and so stave off its end result: death. This task did not strike anyone at the time as impossible; on the contrary, for a civilization that had brought peace to the land, could create architectural marvels and already had a rich tradition of medicine, it seemed only one more step down the same golden road.
So just as he believed in the possibility of orderly government and well-regulated commerce, the First Emperor believed too in the elixir of life. Legends abounded of those who had found such a thing and been transformed into immortal beings, immune to the ravages of time. It existed, he was sure, and it had to be found: it would be the crowning glory of the civilization he had created. And so he traveled the length and breadth of his empire, performing sacrifices at the sacred mountains, consulting the shamans and scholars he met on his way and avidly consuming the cocktail of potions, pills and putative elixirs that they prescribed. Then one day he met a wise man called Xu Fu, who claimed to know where the immortals kept their secrets.
XU Fu lived on one of the islands off northeast China that had long been associated with the elixir. He told the emperor that there were three mountains in the Yellow Sea. Though they were not far from the coast, they were protected by magical winds that blew any boats off course that tried to reach their shores. But those lucky few sailors who managed to land had found a country where the animals and plants were all of the purest white and the palaces were made of silver and gold. Those who dwelled on these islands were the immortals, for they had discovered the true elixir of life.
In great excitement, the First Emperor commissioned Xu Fu to lead an expedition to find this elixir. The magician set off with three thousand virgin boys and girls—only the innocent, he claimed, would be granted the magic formula. They would sail to these islands and beg the immortals to share their secrets.
Several years later, the emperor’s travels once again took him to the northerly coast of his vast dominions. There he sought out Xu Fu to hear his progress in securing the true elixir—much to Xu Fu’s surprise. The magician had nothing to show for himself except an enormous bill of expenses and fewer virgins in his party. When he heard this, the emperor was furious; he had killed many a man for less.
The quick-thinking wizard reassured his ruler that he was more certain than ever that the elixir was to be found on the spirit islands. During their many difficult and dangerous attempts, he claimed, they had even come close to mastering the terrible winds that surrounded the isles. But whenever they were within reach of their pure white shores, huge sea beasts blocked the way and chased them back to the mainland. If only they had a squad of crossbowmen, they would surely be able to defeat these beasts and secure the elixir.
Desperation had made the First Emperor credulous: his desire to find the cure for mortality was such that he gave Xu Fu the troops he asked for. That night, inspired by Xu Fu’s story, the emperor dreamed he was fighting a mighty sea spirit armed only with a crossbow. Convinced that this was an omen that an evil sea demon was blocking his route to immortality, he ordered the local sailors to catch the monster. Then he himself stood on a nearby beach and waited, crossbow in hand, for them to bring him the beast.
Xu Fu, meanwhile, set sail with his treasure, virgins and bowmen—and was never seen in China again.
WHEN Xu Fu left for the second time with his extraordinary entourage, he sailed off into the realm of legend. According to one tradition he landed in Japan and founded a new society, proclaiming himself king. Known there by the name of Jofuku, he has the status of a saint, even a god, in Japanese mythology. He is credited with bringing agriculture, medicine, metallurgy and silk to the previously primitive people of those islands, transforming their culture.
Remarkably, archaeological evidence suggests there was indeed a major and sudden leap forward in Japanese culture in the third century BCE, exactly the time Xu Fu was said to have departed on his voyage: hunting and gathering were replaced by rice farming, stone tools by metal, furs by woven clothes, cave dwelling by freestanding houses. The town of Shingu on the southeastern coast of Japan’s Honshu island still celebrates its claim to be the place where Xu Fu landed with his army of virgins and set about civilizing the land.
So as with many myths, it may well be that the tale of Xu Fu’s disappearance from China and discovery of Japan contains more than a kernel of truth. But the legend does not end there: having founded his new society, Xu Fu is said to have continued the quest for the elixir of life, traveling to the hermits who lived on Mount Fuji. There he finally found the secret he had been looking for throughout his long voyage. The reclusive sages made him their chief, and there, according to legend, Xu Fu still lives his ethereal and saintly existence, high on the cloud-topped peak.
THE FOUNDING MYTHS OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD
THE bringer of civilization is the bringer of better, longer life. And his reward—and the promise he holds out for his followers—is life without end. This is the message in the Japanese version of the Xu Fu story, and it is exactly the model that the First Emperor was following when he created his own empire, for it is identical to the legend on which Chinese society was based. Indeed, it is a motif we see again and again in the founding myths of cultures around the world: civilization is built on the promise of immortality.
The battery of technologies that Xu Fu is credited with introducing to a still stone-age Japan genuinely would have contributed to increased lif
espans for the island’s inhabitants. That, indeed, is their point, which is why it is entirely natural that the legend then seamlessly goes on to tell how Xu Fu’s genius culminated with his finding the elixir of life. The writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For a person wondering at the magical-seeming achievements of civilization, from the plow to heart bypass surgery, an elixir of life can seem an entirely plausible next step. This is as true now as it was in ancient Japan.
Just as it was also already true in ancient China when the First Emperor came to power. The title he took for himself when he ceased to be the humble king of Qin was modeled on a legendary forebear, Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor. In taking on his new title, the king was attempting to take on some of this mythical figure’s enormous prestige. And he was also hoping to copy his career: for Huang Di was also a civilization builder who was said to have triumphed over death. It was Huang Di who had introduced the essentials of early Chinese culture—he was to the people of China what Xu Fu was to the Japanese—and his reward was immortality. When the First Emperor attempted to start a new state, founding China anew, he was consciously emulating this predecessor and hoping for the same reward.
According to legend, Huang Di ruled for a hundred years from 2697 BCE. His reign ushered in a period of peace, unity and progress in which, according to tradition, all the fundamentals of civilization were invented: plows, animal husbandry, music, the calendar, martial arts, medicine, silk weaving and even writing. Having thus brought order and prosperity to his kingdom, Huang Di was able to dedicate himself to his true goal: the pursuit of eternal life. According to legend, he enjoyed the assistance of a goddess, who sent three handmaidens to instruct him personally in the arts of longevity; one of them even taught him how to channel sexual energy in his quest, an association of sex, semen and lifespan that survived well into modern times. Huang Di’s diligence and virtue were eventually rewarded with the elixir of life; on partaking of his discovery he was instantly transformed, becoming immune to aging and disease—whereupon a kindly dragon arrived to take him to live in the far-flung Kunlun Mountains of northern Tibet to dwell for eternity.
